' In the 20th century, Cantonese speakers in southern China and Hong Kong began using "gongfu" in the more specialized meaning of "martial arts" (typically known in Mandarin as "wushu"). Some of those Cantonese speakers brought the word to California. One student at a San Francisco club was James Yimm Lee, an American-born welder and Army vet. He began publishing books on martial arts that he distributed through mail order, starting in 1958 with "Fighting Arts of the Orient: Elemental Karate and Kung Fu."

' It was the "kung fu" spelling that won out, however, in the small but growing martial-arts community in the U.S. Beginning in 1963, the word began popping up in the magazine Black Belt, though sometimes it was conflated with the more popular Japanese art of karate. In January 1965, the magazine ran a long feature on "the ancient Chinese fighting art of kung-fu."